Thursday, December 12, 2013

Through Russian Snows A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow - by G.A. Henty

Free US/UK Kindle
Classic

Everywhere
the winter is hard. Great Britain and
the States are having a miserable winter.
But however "frightful" it is outside your window, you can
always console yourself. You are not
with Napoleon's Army retreating from Moscow!
So stop feeling sorry for yourself and curl up with "Through
Russian Snows A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow" by English
novelist, G.A. Henty. (US Edition) (UK Edition)
This is a historical novel, not nonfiction.

BORODINO: Barbarously as the
French army behaved on its advance to Smolensk, things were even worse as they
left the ruined town behind them and resumed their journey towards Moscow. It
seemed that the hatred with which they were regarded by the Russian peasantry
was now even more than reciprocated. The destruction they committed was wanton
and wholesale; the villages, and even the towns, were burnt down, and the whole
country made desolate. It was nothing to them that by so doing they added
enormously to the difficulties of their own commissariat; nothing that they
were destroying the places where they might otherwise have found shelter on
their return. They seemed to destroy simply for the sake of destruction, and to
be animated by a burning feeling of hatred for the country they had invaded.

Since the days of the thirty
years' war in Germany, never had war been carried on in Europe so mercilessly
and so destructively.

Tolstoy, he is not.
Henty is, what we would call now, a Young Adult writer. That is a very popular now as it was
then.

The book is a story about two brothers:

Julian had, since their retreat
began, again recovered his spirits. He was now not fighting to conquer a
country against which he had no animosity, but for his own life and that of the
thousands of sick and wounded.

"I am glad that we are in the
rear-guard," he said to a number of non-commissioned officers who were one
evening, when they were fortunate enough to be camped in a wood, gathered round
a huge fire.

"Why so, Jules? It
seems to me that we have the hardest work, and, besides, there is not a day
that we have not to fight."

"That is the thing that does us
good," Julian replied. "The columns ahead have nothing to do but to
think of the cold, and hunger, and misery. They straggle along; they no longer
march. With us it is otherwise. We are still soldiers; we keep our order. We
are proud to know that the safety of the army depends on us; and, if we do get
knocked over with a bullet, surely that is a better fate than dropping from
exhaustion, and falling into the hands of the peasants."

The retreat from Moscow is endlessly fascinating.

This blog is a guide to the best free
and inexpensive classic literature for the US & UK Kindle. If you enjoy my
suggestions, please tell your friends who read to give my blog a try.

For a nominal fee of 99 cents/pence, you can subscribe to
this blog and have it automatically download on your Kindle. (It is one of the top 100 blogs on
Amazon.)This gives you the convenience of being able to download the books
directly to your Kindle, instead of downloading them to your computer and then
transferring them to your Kindle. It also helps support my blog.

UK
readers may go to this
Amazon link to subscribe. (Slightly more than half my readers are
from the UK)

Thank
to all my readers, whether you subscribe on your Kindle or whether you read it
online. I love to get good reviews! Who wouldn't? Should you
care to leave a review, follow these links for UK
readers or US
readers. You may e-mail me at marilyn@marilynlitt.com

About Me

I am a Hoosier who spent many years in Chicago and am now in San Antonio. My passion is reuniting lost dogs with their families. I am the Director of the Facebook page, Lost Dogs of Texas and a co-founder of "Lost Dog Awareness Day."

I am not new to reuniting families. After Katrina, I helped people in evacuee shelters in San Antonio to track their missing family members. After that work ended, I started a volunteer group that reunited over 1500 Katrina animals with their families by deciphering information online and tracing evacuees.

I am writing a book about two stolen Yorkies who were found after an amazing eighteeen month search. It is tentatively titled "Finding Baxter and Cooper: A Woman, a Private Investigator and their Successful Search for Two Stolen Dogs."